The ties that bind

Some first-blush post-mortems of the Great Seinfeld Shutdown of 2013 have missed one bigger point.

John Boehner may have got next to nothing in his 16-day standoff with the White House — except a reprieve from the red-hots in his own caucus who are grateful for the rope he gave them. But Barack Obama got not much more. The president’s “victory” is so far only a ticket to fight the same battles all over again early next year.

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Shutdown aftermath: Harris, Purdum assess damage

What Obama said, why it matters

If anything important gets done in Washington in the coming months, it will only be because Boehner and Obama can somehow set aside their mutual distaste and distrust to do it. Every other available option merely kicks the can down the road. The two men’s situations are more similar than either would like to admit, and not just because it’s easy to imagine either one of them alone in his office, craving a smoke, incredulous that the tea party has tortured him yet again, and desperate to avoid another government shutdown, or debt ceiling showdown, in 12 weeks or 12 months.

“You’re president, he’s the speaker,” said David Winston, a Republican pollster and strategist who lived through Newt Gingrich’s battles with Bill Clinton and is also close to Boehner. “For the country to work, they have to work. This is not an option. It’s part of the job for both sides.”

No one thought a deal between Boehner and Obama could offer a way out of the latest crisis, if only because the larger political realities and the star-crossed pair’s apparent personal distaste for each other have left them blind to the ties that bind them. Still, there are significant ways in which the instincts and interests of the president and the speaker are actually aligned, and might yet be exploited in the future, if both are willing to dare it.

To begin with, both men are pragmatists and neither is deeply ideological. Boehner made bipartisan deals with Ted Kennedy on education, and Obama began his career in the Illinois Senate, where he worked with Republicans to reform the death penalty and curb racial profiling. Both saw Ronald Reagan as a transformational president: He turned Boehner, then getting rich as a plastics packaging salesman, from a J.F.K. Democrat into a Reagan Republican, and Obama said he’d like his presidency to be as meaningful as Reagan’s — not as transitory as Bill Clinton’s.

Neither man was born to the purple, and both have come a long way up in the world. Boehner grew up making “plate lunches” at Andy’s Café, his father’s bar in gritty Carthage, Ohio, and Obama grew up eating them at the scruffy Rainbow Drive-In in Honolulu. Boehner’s menu might have been ham on rye, and Obama’s Spam with rice. But macaroni salad and cigarettes would have been at home in both places.

Both guys love golf, and are good at the game, though Boehner is so much better at it that the fiercely competitive Obama has resisted playing with him, and their one joint outing three years ago took on all the awkward, staged aspects of an international summit, instead of a good walk spoiled in which real business might get done between two people who knew and trusted each other.

Most of all, neither Boehner nor Obama can keep lurching from fiscal cliff to phony crisis if they ever hope to get anything else done. Government by episodic acting out and dueling news conferences is hardly government at all, and for all his past disappointments, Boehner has made it clear he would still like to try for a “grand bargain” on overhauling taxes and entitlement programs.

For his part, as he repeated on Thursday, Obama wants comprehensive immigration reform. How can there be progress on such big issues — or any others — if the best that Congress can do is finance the government in short bursts tied to the lunar cycle?

So why can’t this marriage be made?

The easy answer, of course, is that if Boehner made such a match, he might well lose his job, whereas Obama would be freer to do his, instead of just putting out brushfires over the most basic operations of government once a quarter. That seems like an unfair political bargain on its face, and Boehner is not wrong to be worried about his fate. Since Charles Halleck of Indiana toppled Joseph Martin of Massachusetts 54 years ago, no House Republican leader has really left his post voluntarily. And arguably only one of them, Gerald Ford, who was plucked into an appointed vice presidency by Richard Nixon, ever got a better job.